Store Rulings In Dupage Add A Twist To Drug War

Alleged Paraphernalia Targeted By Injunction

December 28, 1998|By Ted Gregory, Tribune Staff Writer.

DuPage County Judge Michael Galasso's recent ruling in a drug paraphernalia case is either the latest surgical strike in the war on drugs or "McCarthyism ignorance" toward alternative approaches to smoking legal substances.

It all depends on how one perceives the items sold at Sight & Sound in Westmont and Alternative Universe in Downers Grove--and how they are marketed.

In making his ruling last week, Galasso determined that items sold at Sight & Sound were drug paraphernalia marketed for illegal use. The judge imposed an injunction barring the establishment from selling those items, most of which are water pipes and other devices made for smoking.

It was the second such injunction against a DuPage business selling the merchandise. The first occurred in mid-1997, when Alternative Universe was hit with an injunction forbidding its owner from selling items considered drug paraphernalia.

The cases differ from the prevailing approach to drug violations, in which authorities pursue criminal charges. In the cases against Alternative Universe and Sight & Sound, prosecutors filed civil complaints arguing the businesses were a public nuisance and asking the judge to halt the sale of alleged drug paraphernalia there.

"I thought we were being pretty lenient about the whole thing," said Joe Ruggiero, supervisor of narcotics prosecutions in the DuPage County state's attorney's office. "We could have found out about it and arrested them. I think this is more than fair. We're just asking them to stop selling certain items."

And it has been more effective than criminal prosecutions for selling drug paraphernalia. Appellate courts have tended to scrutinize those felony criminal convictions more closely and overturn them.

But Joe Sallemmi, owner of Sight & Sound, and Elizabeth Wiechern, owner of Alternative Universe, say they are retailers providing goods for legal use and that the county prosecutors are overstepping their authority.

"I don't understand why all of a sudden we're a public nuisance," said Sallemmi, who opened Sight & Sound in 1976. "Water pipes have been around since right after Christ."

Added Wiechern, who opened her store in 1993: "My rights are being violated and your rights are being violated because they're telling you (that) you can't smoke your tobacco out of a water pipe."

Sallemmi and Wiechern argue that they market the water pipes and related merchandise for use with alternative, but legal, tobacco, such as that made from herbs. That distinction, they contend, adheres to the Illinois Drug Paraphernalia Act, which states the items must be "peculiar to and marketed for" use with controlled substances to be considered illegal.

"It's like if I went out and bought a bottle of liquor, then went someplace else and bought a glass and got drunk," said Sallemmi, who also sells T-shirts and other clothing, incense, jewelry, posters, lighters and cigars in the store. "They want to blame the guy who sold the glass. How can I control my customers' uses?"

But Ruggiero said the comparison doesn't fit that neatly. He noted that Sight & Sound, for example, displays T-shirts with marijuana plant symbols and other shirts calling for the legalization of marijuana. The store also sells a product designed to hide traces of marijuana in drug tests, he said.

"If you look at the people going into these stores," he added, "it's kids, and the legitimacy given to this stuff sends a terrible message to young people at a very impressionable time in their lives. So, I think this is very important."

Wiechern said the effort is misguided. She said that the water pipes help filter out some THC, the mood-altering substance in marijuana, as well as formaldehyde and other harmful substances in tobacco.

"It's like McCarthyism ignorance," she said of prosecutors. "It's uninformed. They don't even know what they're fighting. They don't understand the properties of these materials."

Wiechern might get a chance to explain her arguments in greater detail. Authorities have filed a complaint alleging that she broke terms of the injunction by continuing to sell pipes.

She says she will fight it.

"I was going to sell the store and move someplace else," she said. "And then I decided that it's really not right that they're telling people what they can smoke legally and how they can smoke it. I've made it this far and I'm going to stick around and see where it goes."